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The luxurious man-cave-ish showroom on Wellington St. E. is an oasis for elevated male fashion sensibilities with rich tweeds and cashmeres draping from mannequins.

Your fingers pinch sumptuous scarves as Nguyen, emerging from the back room in an azure, hand-crafted ensemble with a trademark scoop vest, passes you a scotch at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.

This guy has it figured.

In addition to dressing his core Bay Street dandy crowd, he makes suits for the Toronto Blue Jays’, Toronto Raptors’ and Toronto FC players. And well-dressed TV personalities like the guys who play Harvey Specter on the show Suits and Hannibal Lecter on the NBC show Hannibal.

The son of Vietnamese immigrants, Nguyen has followed a calling that dates back two generations before him in his seamstress mother and fabric merchant grandfather.

He traces the moment he first understood the power of fashion to his seven-year-old self.

The archetype of the unseen, soft-spoken boy who grew up overshadowed by boisterous, attention-grabbing older sisters, he remembers descending down the stairs of his family home wearing a white tuxedo for his communion ceremony.

“I went from being invisible to this moment where people were noticing me and suddenly treating me differently.”

It stuck.

From then on, personal presentation considerations became a strict daily regimen.

“I still spend a significant amount of time everyday thinking about what I’m going to wear.”

And he is urging us lads to do the same.

Buying a suit from Nguyen bears little resemblance to what you might experience at The Bay.

It’s a protracted negotiation. An initial consultation where he asks a lot of questions about your lifestyle, stares at your eye colour and holds fabric swatches up to judge their relationship to your complexion. Then come the forensic discussions: button holes, pocket placement and hemming lengths.

There’s a fitting. Nips and tucks. Then another fitting.

In all, four meetings over a couple of months during which you eventually realize you’re not just investing in a suit. You’re taking in a master’s class in male style.

“It’s about getting knowledge of something you should know. It’s like shaving. Men really need to understand what they’re wearing and why.”

Nguyen launched his enterprise seven years ago, just as the bespoke trend was emerging as a throwback to an earlier time.

When I was a kid, I remember going to the suit store with my immaculately dressed, Manhattan banker dad.

He had a guy in Brooklyn.

I’d watch my father stand before a mirror in a haberdashery on a Saturday morning as an old Italian tailor measured him with surgical precision, the measuring tape unraveling across the length of his arms and legs again and again.

Nguyen is that guy circa 2015.

But beyond just cutting classic suits for businessmen, Nguyen has injected novelty and innovation into the once stodgy trade.

Take, for example, the bulletproof suit he developed with nano-tube-filled material that will stop a 45 mm bullet on contact, he says. (He says he tested it at an Ajax gun club for marketing claim accuracy).

So far, six men have met Garrison’s $20,000 price point for the suit, says Nguyen. They include lads who may actually be in the crosshairs of gunmen — including lawyers, bankers and engineers working on mining sites in Eastern Europe — and a tech-loving entrepreneur or two who simply think it’s cool.

On the much lighter side, he’s just finished measuring the entire Raptor team with what he says will be the world’s most comfortable suit made from the stretch material of basketball jerseys.

Many of the ideas Nguyen will propose to you have been gathered abroad during regular stylish intelligence-gathering trips.

So, he can now report to you that the prevailing men’s shoe trend in Vienna this year is earth tones. From Marrakesh, he returned with new possibilities for the use of silk in the wardrobe of the modern male (however questionable a concept that remains).

Lads like us will wonder at some of his more fashion-forward ideas. We’ll go home and think about them. They’ll play around for a while.

We’ll end up back there with a scotch in hand and, in an act of faith, submit to his vision.

As Nguyen listened to the story of my late father’s suits recently, he asked me to bring in one of the ’70s garments gathering dust in my closet. I left it with him.

When I returned to pick up a new jacket he’d made me, Nguyen pointed to its bone buttons. They looked familiar.

He took them from my dad’s jacket.

“Your dad touched those buttons a thousand times,” Nguyen said. “There’s a little bit of him in the jacket.”

The merging of fashion, sentiment and nostalgia is a powerful elixir.

Toronto Star investigative reporter Robert Cribb’s video series Mankind explores relationships, career, fashion, style, health and fitness for men. He can be reached at rcribb@thestar.ca

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